Cosy Sheridan, Gloria Steinem and the wisdom of women

Snowday

The director of my choir is a force to be reckoned with. A talented leader, he is also harsh, fairly aloof to most of us, and sometimes domineering. I don't think I would ever choose to be in the same room with him were it not for a choir rehearsal. But for rehearsals, he is unbeatable. We, a ragtag community choir, rise to great heights under his hand keeping the beat, and his voice, alternately counting and critiquing. 

On the weeks when he is not there, the assistant director, Kerrin, leads rehearsal. I know I am not alone in my disappointment when I walk in and Kerrin is on the stage. (They never tell us when Brady will be out of town, because they probably know we wouldn't come to rehearsal.) 

Kerrin is a talented and knowledgeable musician, and a capable director. The only person who seems to doubt this is Kerrin herself. Therefore her leadership is somewhat painful to undergo, because she is constantly apologizing and undercutting her own ability. 
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry for not being clear." 
"Did you get lost there? Maybe it's just me that gets lost." (She doesn't get lost.) 
"Good! Goodgoodgoodgoodgood." (When we haven't done well at all, but she seems afraid to be anything but positive.) 

The sopranos talk constantly through her rehearsals, something they never do with Brady. We go much, much more slowly through the music, and she asks "Did anything stick out in there? Should we go over it again?" When all we want is someone to tell us where to start and what to work on. It can be disheartening when the leader doesn't assume the role of leader thoroughly enough. 

I think about this in relation to the classroom. I do ask for student input and reflection often. Sometimes I'll ask for their help on small things like how we should rearrange into a circle. Should we go around these two tables? Should we move the tables to the corners? This seems minor, and maybe it is. But I want them to know I value their ability to problem solve in a context when their contribution is relevant. If I'm deciding how to lead a part of my English lesson, I'm less likely to ask their opinion, since it's my job, and ostensibly my area of expertise, to know how to lead the lesson, and I don't think they would have a better idea than I would, about whether to share in groups of 2 or 3, or whether to write for five minutes before talking through their ideas. Maybe they would. 

But I wish Kerrin would be more confident in her role as director when she is up there. Last night, she said we needed to cut off on time at a certain place, because she wasn't going to be able to cue everyone at that moment. "I'm only human, unfortunately," she said. This made me want to cry. Everything about how she presents reveals that she truly, truly believes, as many women do, that it is unfortunate that they are only human. When society tells them to be so much more, they are disappointed and ashamed to find they have (in the words of Othello's Emilia:) "Affections, desires for sport, and frailties, as men have". I want to call out to Kerrin - it's OK to have frailties! We all have frailties! And that is what makes life interesting! And (in the words of Hugh Grant's character in Two Weeks Notice:) "Saints are boring!"

On Friday Mum and I went to February's IAMA concert, featuring Mountain Country, and Cosy Sheridan. Mountain Country is a five piece country band, four men and a woman on standing bass, that played all original music. It was typically sexist in its messages: a woman is "a good thing" something "nice to come home to" that "smells good". The male speaker in the songs is "hard to hold onto" and a "rambler." 

I would have been more willing to forgive these as the conventions of the genre were it not for the fact that at the end of the set the lead singer and guitar player introduced each musician by name - except the woman playing bass. You could feel the cocked heads and raised eye brows in the UU audience until another band member acknowledged her, and an overwhelming whoop and applause went up from all corners of the room. "She always gets the loudest applause." the leader griped into the microphone. "It's because she's the cutest," quipped the banjo player. 

No, my dears. It is not because she's the cutest. It's because of what we can tell she has to put up with. 



The "rambling" song especially made me think of the memoir by Gloria Steinem that I'm listening to on audio right now, subtitled My Life on the Road. Steinem describes how when she was young, all images of women were associated with home and hearth, and the men were the ones to go gallivanting off. She has bucked that trend by spending more than half of the past 40 years on the road, organizing, mobilizing, speaking, being a feminist activist. 

I am greatly inspired by her commitment to listening, and being part of consensus circles that meet with "all five senses". Think about what that means. 
- Sight - we can all see each other
- Smell - we are close enough to smell each other and the aroma of the ...
- Taste - ...food we are eating together.
- Hear - we are close enough that we can hear without microphones or phones.
- Touch - our chairs are close enough that we had to jostle each other to get into the circle, and we are not afraid to touch each others legs or hands as we pass the talking piece around. 

This reminds me of circle time in advisory, when two student leaders come up with two questions to ask each other, and we discuss them in pairs then come into a circle to talk about them. 

Being part of an audience has always seemed sadly distant from the idea Gloria Steinem describes. I wish that at a concert or a talk there was more sense of being part of a listening circle among audience members. 

Cosy Sheridan

The second set on Friday night was by Cosy Sheridan, and I felt us approach the ideal of audience unity under her influence. The first sign was that, after the song "The Pomegranate Seed" a woman two rows ahead of me waited until the applause died and exclaimed "That was beautiful!" She spoke the "sense of the room" as Quakers would put it. The next sign that we as an audience had been transformed by her performance was when she said "We'll play one more for you," and a man on the other side of the sanctuary asked with unguarded sincerity, completely devoid of jest or self-deprecation, "Can you just play for another hour?" He too spoke to desire on all of our hearts. I can't remember the last time I was at a concert where I wished the performance would go on for another hour. 


What made Cosy so compelling? Mom said it - "She's a real folk artist." I believe we were drawn to the universal images of humanness that we, like Kerrin, are taught to despise in ourselves and hide from the world. She spoke of her desire to build a fence between herself and her neighbors, feelings of shame before a mother, the desire to be healthy combined with distaste for healthy things, the difficulty of finding fulfilling work and liking the life we've made, and the challenge of feeling OK about having less money than we associate with mainstream "success". She conveyed these ideas with warmth and humor and harmony, a sure-fire way to get them to sink home immediately. 

The last time I was in an audience that seemed linked to the same degree was listening to Colson Whitehead speak at the SLC Public Library, where he lifted his iPad to the microphone in order to convey the crackly sound of a 1960's song, which he mouthed the words to until we were all singing along (well, all the people who had been conscious for the original broadcasting of the song - I had never heard it before). We were united in song, something I'm sure none of us expected when we arrived at the auditorium and promptly ignored everyone around us, even in the very next seat. There were spontaneous spurts of laughter during this song, which I think revealed the degree to which people were taken out of themselves by this turn of events. 

Today is a snow day, my first since high school, I think. The phenomenon has lost none of its magic!